


Bruce Banner is Sometimes Very Clueless

by TheoMiller



Series: something bigger [7]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Awkward Sexual Situations, Bruce Has Issues, Communication Failure, Demisexuality, F/M, M/M, Multi, Natasha Is a Good Bro, Natasha is bad at wooing, Oblivious Bruce Banner, another avenger comes out on the colbert report, confused Bruce, token straight person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-05
Updated: 2014-08-05
Packaged: 2018-02-11 20:49:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2082693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Natasha steals clothing to show affection for her teammates, Bruce STILL thinks Clintasha is canon, and absolutely no-one is straight (except for Bruce).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bruce Banner is Sometimes Very Clueless

**Author's Note:**

> There will be a companion fic entitled "Natasha Romanoff Might Be a Sentimentalist After All", wherein Natasha comes to terms with having a thing for Bruce and tries to woo him with Torchwood and snickerdoodles.

 “Hi,” Natasha said, and flopped on the couch beside Bruce. “Everyone’s gone, you get to entertain me.”

He grinned and ducked his head. “Yeah? Is that how it works?”

“Yep. I gotta make sure Clint schedules his training of baby SHIELD agents for nights other than Date Night.”

“That does put a cramp in romance,” he said.

“I should set you up with someone,” she mused. “How do you feel about former firefighters?”

“Well, why is it ‘former’?” he said, more to humour her than anything else.

She frowned. “I’m not sure. But she would totally embrace our lifestyle, she was a smokejumper.”

“Sounds interesting,” he acknowledged, “but I’m not sure I’m cut out to date a total stranger.”

“Hmm,” she said. “You’re straight, so that sort of cuts down on things. What do you think about Maria?”

Bruce rolled his eyes. “I’m going to wait for you to realize that’s a terrible idea before I respond.”

“Yeah, I considered it _after_ I said it. I’ll find someone. How do you feel about brunettes?”

“Uh, ambivalent?”

“All right,” she said, and pulled out her phone.

Bruce groaned and covered his eyes. “Are you—you’re taking notes right now. You are incorrigible.”

“So I’ve been told,” Natasha agreed.

X-x-X-x-X

“Where the hell is my hoodie?” Bucky grumbled. “You been stealing my clothes? Kinky, but pick other clothes, because that is my goddamn hoodie. That thing is softer than bunny fur. _Bunny fur_ , Tony!”

“Hey, whoa, do you see me cuddling into endless softness?” snapped Tony.

Steve groaned and set coffee in front of both of them. “I know who has it. I’ll be right back. You guys drink your caffeine.”

Natasha glanced up at him when he strode out of the elevator. May jabbed at her solar plexus and Nat grabbed her hand, twisting it behind her back only for May to spring back and knock them both to the mat.

“Do you need something?” Nat asked, flipping them over.

“Bucky’s hoodie,” he said. “The one that was on the foot of our bed last night?”

Melinda bucked Natasha off, and they both jumped up. “The one on the chair?” she asked, flicking ebony hair out of her eyes and falling into a crouch.

“Yeah, Steve, over there,” Nat said, nodding toward the kitchen.

He went over to the kitchen, where one of her barstools was draped with a soft blue hoodie. “I like the sparring mat in the living room – you storing that in the coat closet?”

“Floor compartment,” replied Natasha.

“Huh,” he said. “All right. Nice seeing you, Melinda!”

X-x-X-x-X

Bruce had his head down and was totally focused on the numbers from Tony’s latest hearing aid upgrade testing round, and he totally missed JARVIS’s warnings. And walked right onto Clint’s floor, because he knew for a fact Natasha was out of the country with Cap and Bucky, so he really didn’t expect to find sex happening.

Particularly gay sex. Right on Clint’s couch. Right in the view of the elevator. That, that was not even in the realm of possibility for him, although Nat _had_ mentioned that only Bruce was straight, so Clint could conceivably be bi, but he was pretty sure they’d had several conversations about Clint wanting to be exclusive with Nat, so—

“Well,” Coulson said, after a long and startled silence. “This is rather unprofessional.”

Bruce squeezed his eyes shut and immediately backed towards the elevator. “I’m just gonna—wait, does Nat know?”

“It was Nat’s goddamn idea,” Clint said.

“I’m gonna leave now,” Bruce said. “I have, um, data. On hearing aid. Stuff. Come find me when you’re, um, done.”

X-x-X-x-X

“You’re being weird,” Tony accused.

Bruce glanced up at him. “Do you and Steve and Bucky ever discuss… I mean, you all like women as well, right? Do you guys ever, like, make agreements with women?”

“Nope,” Tony said. “Why the sudden interest in my sex life? Are you planning a surprise present? Because you’ll have to clear that with my boyfriends, I’m pretty sure consent is needed when turning your threesome into a temporary foursome, and we’d all need to sign off on any women, because our tastes probably differ, so it’d make a very bad surprise.”

“No, no, not – no. I was just wondering, y’know, how it all works.”

“Ah, my poor, confused straight friend,” said Tony, slinging an arm around Bruce’s shoulder.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Bruce muttered.

X-x-X-x-X

“What the hell is this?” Clint said.

Bruce looked up from his cup of tea in time to see Clint slam a tabloid down in front of Natasha, and starts to edge out of the room.

“You said I could borrow it,” Natasha replied, “and then you sent me to get you coffee. So really, this is your fault.”

He edged back in, because that didn’t sound like the jealousy-fueled lover’s spat he’d been expecting. He approached the table and saw that the front page was a picture of Natasha wearing a giant, neon purple sweater with leggings and a studded belt. He choked on a laugh when, after a moment, he realized that was Clint’s Official Comfy Happy Times Sweater. It was big on Clint, so it slipped down Nat’s shoulders and left it bare except for her bra strap.

The caption read _Black Widow’s Style Turning Heads – Page 6_ , and he reached between them without thinking to open it to the page in question where, yep, starlets everywhere were copying the look with a wide variety of oversized sweaters.

He couldn’t help but laugh then, and Clint glared at him without real heat. Natasha looked over her shoulder and quirked a wicked smile at him while Clint ranted about his favorite sweater becoming a goddamn women’s fashion icon.

X-x-X-x-X

“Where’s Clint?” Bruce asked, when he returned to his floor to find Natasha sprawled across his couch, flicking through his Netflix queue.

“The bird boys are on a mission with our favorite billionaire,” she said. “There’s excellent money on one of them killing Stark before it’s over, and we’re trying to decide which supersoldier will avenge him. Is this spinoff any good?”

He took a minute to process the subject change, but when he glanced at the Netflix screen, she had paused on _Torchwood_. “Uh… Jack’s a bit of an asshole, but it’s a more realistic and gritty view on the universe, if you ask me. Plus, Jack’s non-heterosexuality is irrevocably confirmed.”

“Sounds good,” she said, and lined up the first episode.

“Speaking of non-heterosexuality,” he said, as he settled into his favorite chair. “You said I was the only straight Avenger. If you don’t mind me asking…”

“Have you _seen_ dinner conversations in the tower? Of course I don’t give a damn about discussing sexuality.”

Bruce did his best not to sigh in relief, and Natasha swung her legs off the couch and propped them up on his coffee table before patting the cushion next to her. He moved slowly, because he still had this weird feeling he’d spook her if they got too personal, and then she returned to lying on the couch, her knees in Bruce’s lap. “Well,” she said, while they watched Gwen go through her introductory sequences, “for a while, I didn’t realize my experience with sex wasn’t the same as everyone else’s. I considered it to be a part of life, like eating or killing. I didn’t feel any desire to sleep with anyone in particular. May has an impeccable queerdar, so she took one look at me and then she was explaining asexuality. It wasn’t until Clint and I got closer that I determined that I was, in fact, demisexual.”

“Huh,” he said. “That’s… thank you for sharing that with me.”

“Sam says I should volunteer more information than required to build rapport with my teammates,” said Nat, and Bruce grinned.

“Since when do you listen to Sam?”

“Since I discovered he is more than willing to follow me around in an attempt to convince me to listen to him. For days. He’s very persistent.”

They fell silent, watching the rather silly plot unfold onscreen.

“I don’t like Gwen,” commented Nat when it ended. “I find the other characters far more compelling.”

“I like Ianto,” he said.

She tilted her head. “He is very well-dressed. You should invest in a few waistcoats.”

X-x-X-x-X

“Where’s my suit?” Sam said, feeling a surge of anxiety when he saw the wings were gone too, and then he noticed the little slip of paper. He seized it and scanned the neat handwriting— _Will return, xoxo, Natasha_. “Goddammit, Romanoff!”

X-x-X-x-X

“There’s a reason Sam doesn’t have much hair to speak of,” Bruce said, when Natasha landed on the helipad. The wings slid back in with ease.

“What, think I should go the Karen Gillan route?” asked Natasha, grinning as she unslung the jetpack. “Wigs are difficult in fights. Come on, you get to help me detangle this mess.”

He laughed. “It’s funny that you think that’s going to happen.”

(It did.)

X-x-X-x-X

Ms. Grey was not amused. Not even a little bit.

“You wore the famous sweater around Brooklyn, _you_ wore men’s size Captain America merchandise on a mission, do you realize how much damage control I’m going to have to do?”

“The sweater was mine first,” Clint grumbled.

“All my clothes are black,” Nat offered. “It’s too warm for black in the Caribbean.”

“You’re both doing interviews,” she said flatly. “We’ll angle it as a chat with the human Avengers, Tony will be too busy to come, and you will explain that the two of you are not engaged in some convoluted, clothes-sharing love triangle with Steve Rogers!”

X-x-X-x-X

Bruce stole a bit of Tony’s popcorn while the interviewer – thankfully, they’d managed to get Stephen Colbert, so it wouldn’t be a complete train wreck – waited for the crowd to quiet down.

“All right,” Colbert said. “I gotta said, I’m disappointed in the two of you. Not only are you refusing to make everyone’s favorite Avengers power couple canon, you’re corrupting a national icon with your lover’s tryst.”

“You make it sound like we got handsy on the Statue of Liberty,” Clint complained.

Natasha patted his knee. “Maybe for your birthday,” she said, and Colbert stabbed a finger at them.

“See?” he said. “See, this is what I mean. You two are being adorable and flirty while refusing to admit that you’re lovers in the night!”

“Lovers? I think my boyfriend would take exception to that,” said Clint.

There was quite a bit of screaming, which included someone shouting “AGAIN?!” in the audience. Bruce dropped his teacup, which was thankfully empty.

Colbert was rather red in the face from laughing when things finally quieted down enough to ask more questions. “Okay,” he said, and then paused to laugh again. “Okay, so, if you have a boyfriend, I have two questions. First of all, is it me?”

Natasha nodded solemnly onscreen, and Bruce stared around at everyone, expecting them to be as shocked as him. Instead, they were shaking their heads and muttering _about time_ and _finally_ and _congrats, Phil_ , and then it began to click.

“No,” said Clint, laughing. “It’s our friend and honorary teammate, Phil Coulson. Natasha’s the one who got us to stop pining in the first place. She’s a great bro, but I’m almost exclusively into dudes, and off the market.”

“Holy shit,” Bruce murmured in the living room of the commons area in Avengers Tower, and Tony gave him a confused side-glance.

“So I have a shot,” Colbert said, and waggled his eyebrows. “No, okay, okay, second question – Natasha, who are you dating? Is it Steve? Please say it’s Steve, you could have beautiful ginger children and end Russian-American tension,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Natasha, “no, I’m not dating anyone. Clint’s boyfriend is a huge Cap fan, and I stole the shirt from him.”

Clint put on a martyred expression. “She’s a clothing thief. She made my favorite sweater a trend.”

Bruce quietly excused himself, picking up his teacup and going to stand in the quiet kitchen. Clint had become exclusive with _Phil_. Natasha had been calling to ask about her friends, not herself. _That_ ’s why they never went on date-night, not some desire to keep things private. They weren’t a couple.

“I’m really smart,” he told his warped reflection on the toaster’s chrome casing. “I promise. I just… have bad days. Weeks. Months.”

And then Bruce started making a plan.

X-x-X-x-X

The plan was, of course, waylaid. Because Natasha did return from the Colbert Report on time (that was the only thing that went according to plan), which apparently meant her showing up in Bruce’s kitchen when he shuffled in with stacks of lab data to make himself tea. “I made cookies,” she said. “Snickerdoodles. They’re Clint’s favorite. I thought they might go well with your tea.”

Bruce’s brain barely registered that he’d dropped his files, because she was wearing one of his button-down shirts. One of his old, worn ones in the shade of purple he not-so-secretly favored. She was also wearing boxers he recognized as Thor’s, but that was sort of secondary. Natasha Romanoff was standing in his kitchen, with freshly baked cookies, because she knew what kind of tea he’d been drinking lately, and she was _wearing one of his old shirts_.

“Hi,” she said quietly, and he realized rather belatedly that he’d moved towards her, and she hadn’t even backed away. “You all right?” she added, studying his face.

“Can—” Bruce broke off. This was ridiculous, and not subtle, and would definitely scare her off. A tiny voice that sounded too much like Tony for comfort said, _just_ say _it, dumbass_.“Can I, um, can I kiss you?”

She rolled her eyes and put the spatula on the counter. “You’re very obtuse,” she accused, and kissed him.

Somehow Bruce ends up sitting on his countertops with Natasha _in his lap_ , and he has absolutely zero complaints about the proceedings, although… “I had a plan,” he said.

“Yeah?” she replied, and swooped back in to nibble at his lip. “What was your plan?”

“I was going to tell you I had more specific parameters for your matchmaking search,” he said, and she laughed.

“What were they?”

“Well, redhead, brilliant, preferably able to kill grown men with her thighs…”

“Seems pretty vague,” she teased, and leaned back in.

**Author's Note:**

> So I promised my mum not to write smut [a promise which is null in a week less than a year], so have cutesy fade to black instead. [[[if you want to do "inspired by" bruce/nat porn in this verse i will love you 5ever]]]


End file.
